But—she clung desperately to the part of her mind that insisted neither prince was worth this. She had not refused to use jinn vessels for so long only to become one herself. This magic had torn her life apart.
“Magic is not just destruction. It is also salvation.” The jinn held out a hand. “Are you truly so stubborn in your beliefs that you would run from this last opportunity?”
Aisha thought of the words she’d spoken to Mazen: The only difference between a hero and a coward is that one forgets their fear and fights, while the other succumbs to it and flees.
Aisha wasn’t conceited enough to call herself a hero, but she was no coward.
She would not give up. She would not die.
Her eyes found the jinn queen’s. If this is a deal, then you must agree to honor my terms as well. She expected an objection from the jinn and was surprised when the queen smiled instead, her teeth glowing an eerie white in the dark.
“Smart human,” she said.
You have to promise you will never use me as a puppet.
“I told you that this was a deal, not possession.” The queen dipped her head. “But if my word is so important, you shall have it, hunter. I promise I will never force you to do anything against your own volition. Your will is your own.”
Aisha should not have been able to move her hand. But somehow, she managed to grasp the queen’s outstretched fingers. Deal.
The jinn smiled a fox-like smile. “A jinn hunter and a jinn. What a great duo we will make.” She squeezed her hand. Aisha’s heart began to beat. Louder and louder and louder until she could feel it pulsing behind her eyes and pounding in her veins.
Slowly, painstakingly, she returned to life.
48
MAZEN
Once, when Hakim had first become a prisoner, he told Mazen freedom was a right only appreciated by those who lost it. That is the way of all lost things. One does not truly understand a thing’s value until it is gone. Mazen had never felt that as profoundly as he did now, sitting in a cave with nothing but his brother’s ill-fitting clothes on his back.
The Sandsea was a distant ever-shifting ocean, the surface disturbed occasionally by a sinking building. It was hard to believe he had been in those ruins hours ago. Even harder to believe there had been four of them before they entered.
Mazen gripped his newly bound arm—he had ripped off a sleeve to stanch the bleeding—and cast a surreptitious look over his shoulder at the merchant. Loulie al-Nazari was still facing a wall, ignoring him. Her slashed ankles were hidden beneath her robe.
Neither of them had talked about what came next.
But then, he wasn’t ready to continue their quest as if nothing had happened. To keep pushing toward Ghiban when the memory of so much death hung in the air. Not when Aisha—
When he blinked, he saw her slumped on the ground in a pool of blood. Aisha bint Louas, one of the forty thieves, dead before he could scream her name.
He hugged his knees to his chest and breathed out slowly. He wouldn’t cry. He’d done enough of that earlier, when he brought the merchant to this cave at the edge of the Sandsea. She had just stared blankly as he collapsed against the wall and sobbed, her grief either already dried up or screaming silently inside her.
Perhaps the merchant found solace in silence. Mazen did not. To him, the quiet had always been a void to fill. But he did not know how to fill this silence. There were too many questions between them, and too much guilt. The merchant had not yet asked about his disguise or his purpose, and he did not want to bring it up. He was too ashamed.
Some motion in the desert caught his attention. He looked up—and froze.
“Al-Nazari.” The merchant didn’t turn. He called her again, and she whirled with a glare that twisted into a pained grimace as she shifted her ankles. Mazen pointed outside at an approaching smudge. “Someone’s coming.”
He had watched the merchant burn Imad and the bangle—Gods, it was an ancient family artifact!—to ashes. He had watched Qadir fade to smoke and Aisha die. He had no idea who was coming for them, but whoever it was, they were making a straight line for their cave.
Unthinkingly, he reached for Omar’s belt of daggers and felt nothing. His brother’s blades were gone. The only weapon they had was Qadir’s knife, and he was certain Loulie would let them be mauled to death before she relinquished it to him.
But still, he had to try. He had to…
He blinked. Narrowed his eyes. “What…?”
“What?” the merchant snapped.
“Aisha,” he said softly.
It was a grief-induced mirage. A hallucination. Jinn magic. It had to be.
And yet he found himself stumbling out into the desert, rushing toward Aisha—Not a mirage, not a mirage—until he was close enough to see the blood on her. It was everywhere: caked onto her like a second skin. Only, the lacerations were gone. And where the gash at her throat had been, there was now a band of skulls that glimmered beneath the varnish of blood.
The Queen of Dunes’ relic.
He remembered the wali of Dhyme, speaking in that uncharacteristically soft voice, laughing as he stabbed his companions and painted the floor with their blood.
Before he could run, Aisha bint Louas stepped forward and gripped him by the shoulder. “Aren’t you going to welcome me back?” She grinned, and it made her eyes shine with a mischief he’d never seen before. Then, abruptly, the grin faded. “We need to talk,” she said, voice suddenly gruff, and then she unceremoniously dragged him behind her toward the cave.
As if nothing had happened.
As if she had not somehow, impossibly, been revived from the dead.
Aisha told them the story of her resurrection in front of the campfire. Mazen noticed the way her hands darted through the air and the way her lips sometimes slanted into a lopsided smirk. Subtle changes. But there were other, more obvious differences as well—her scars, for instance. They’d become an unnatural gray, one that reminded him of dead things. And her right eye—the one that had been sealed with blood—was now more black than brown. It shone like obsidian in the firelight.
It was an unsettling sight, one that evidently put Loulie on edge too. Mazen did not miss the way her grip tightened on her blade every time Aisha looked at her. Paranoia had dug roots into Mazen as well. More than once, he found himself reaching for knives he no longer had. It was impossible to look at Aisha without remembering the Queen of Dunes had tried to kill them—twice.
Wariness clung to him like a shroud when Aisha finished her tale. Before he could speak, the merchant leaned forward and said, “So who are you? Aisha bint Louas? Or the Queen of Dunes?”
Aisha opened her mouth, paused, then closed it. Mazen could tell by the tightness of her jaw that she was gritting her teeth. But then, slowly, the tension disappeared from her body. “Don’t waste your breath on stupid questions. I could never be anyone but myself.”
She and Loulie silently stared at each other. Mazen inched away. Sitting between them was like being battered on either side by a frigid wind.
The merchant shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
Aisha scowled. “I would never succumb to a jinn.”
“Then what do you call this?” The merchant gestured sharply. “Coexistence?”
“You think I wanted this? I already told you: we struck a deal because this is the only way she…” Aisha paused, breathed out slowly. “The only way we can exist in this world. If the jinn had wanted to kill you, she could have used my corpse to do it without striking a bargain.”
Mazen felt himself fidgeting. He stilled his hands. “So to be clear, she no longer wants to murder us?”